The Way We Live Now: 3-12-00: Counter Culture; The New Double Standard

I know it's a stretch, but picture, if you will, Al Gore at a Louis Farrakhan event. Farrakhan isn't there, but his acolytes are. Gore -- stay with me a minute -- is shoring up support among blacks in a hard-fought election. His speech is campaign boilerplate, emphasizing themes of black self-reliance, the persistence of white racism and so on, but nowhere does he mention the Nation of Islam's anti-Semitic, anti-gay, racist ideology, let alone condemn it. He is mobbed. The crowds love him. His poll numbers among blacks, already strong, firm up.

This image is a stretch because not even Al Sharpton would be loopy enough to recommend such an event. Within seconds of even the idea of it leaking, Gore's campaign, indeed his political career, would be virtually over. Whoever recommended the speech would be fired; Gore would apologize; the Democratic Party establishment, once it had gotten over the shock, would essentially excommunicate him. For all these reasons, the event is literally unthinkable -- and not least because Al Gore himself would feel nothing but revulsion at the idea.

But the equivalent has already happened in the Bush campaign. There have been ritual complaints about Bush's February visit to Bob Jones University. But the double standard between black bigots and white bigots endures. Bush, for all the media fuss, has largely survived the Bob Jones association. He has never fully apologized; he has merely regretted his visit. He has yet to disown the university as a whole. When challenged, he berates others for judging what is in his heart and injecting religious discord into an election campaign. Would anyone say the same after a Gore-Farrakhan rally? Not in a million years. And yet the bigotry of Bob Jones is morally indistinguishable from that of the Nation of Islam.

Think I'm exaggerating? Take a second look at what is still proudly up on the university's Web site. The Catholic Church ''is not another Christian denomination,'' according to Bob Jones Jr. ''It is a satanic counterfeit, an ecclesiastic tyranny over the souls of men, not to bring them to salvation but to hold them bound in sin and to hurl them into eternal damnation. It is the old harlot of the Book of the Revelation -- the Mother of Harlots.''' It gets worse. ''She'' -- the Catholic Church -- is drunk with the blood of the saints of God whom she has harassed and persecuted, imprisoned, massacred and destroyed. The monstrous abomination which is Rome has, like a vampire, fattened upon the lifeblood of men and nations. . . . Constantly changing her masks but never her nature, she has infiltrated where she could not command and adapted when she could not enforce.'' Compare that in tone and substance with the following statement made four years ago by Louis Farrakhan in reference to American Jews: ''You are wicked deceivers of the American people. You have sucked their blood. You are not real Jews, those of you that are not real Jews. You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell.''

Sorry, but I can't see any substantive difference. It's the same rhetorical trope -- claims of inauthenticity, of deception, of Satanism, of illicit influence. There are identical claims of dual loyalty. When Dr. Ian Paisley, the most hard-line of Northern Ireland Protestants (guess where he received his honorary doctorate), was denied a visa to enter the United States 18 years ago, Bob Jones III rallied to his defense. Jones's rant is also still proudly on the Web site. Mentioning Al Haig (then secretary of State), Senator Edward Kennedy and Al D'Amato (then a senator), Jones elaborates: ''One has only to look at those names which were lent to the petition against admitting Dr. Paisley to detect the papist influences at work. These men who are supposed to be elected representatives of the people of the United States are actually, in this instance, representing the Vatican. . . . They are not interested in the welfare of the American people. They are interested in what they feel is good for the Roman Catholic Church and for the Irish Republic.''

Compare that with Louis Farrakhan's 1998 reference in a news conference to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; Sandy Berger, the national security adviser; Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary; and the former Clinton adviser Rahm Emanuel. Farrakhan said: ''Every Jewish person that is around the president is a dual citizen of Israel and the United States of America. . . . And sometimes, we have to raise the question, 'Are you more loyal to the state of Israel than you are to the best interests of the United States of America?'''

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Perhaps it's because we are unused to anti-Catholic bigotry in America these days, or associate it mainly with the cultural left, that we fail to grasp how extreme Bob Jones actually is. I remember similar rhetoric growing up as an Irish-Catholic in England. A nearby town burned effigies of the pope each Nov. 5, commemorating the suppression of a Catholic plot to blow up Parliament in 1605. When Pope John Paul II was shot, I was the butt of jokes in my high school about how the pontiff had finally deserved the epithet ''his Holiness.'' My first boss in journalism questioned whether a Catholic could ever be trusted with high office in Britain. So perhaps I'm a little more sensitized to anti-Catholic bigotry than George W. Bush is.

Or the rest of the Republican establishment, for that matter. Among the strongest arguments made by black separatists is that they are held to a higher standard of public accountability than white bigots. The last month has vindicated them. Most prominent blacks have been required at some time or other to condemn Farrakhan and his ideology -- in my view, rightly so. And yet Bob Jones University has, over the past couple of decades, been the host to Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, Bob Dole and Mr. Catholic himself, Pat Buchanan! Three senators -- Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and John Ashcroft -- have accepted honorary degrees. George Bush Sr. went there to meet with the university president to discuss -- what else? -- gay rights. Have any of these people been made to denounce Bob Jones and its unrepentant hate? Have any of them returned their degrees?

Perhaps the weirdest silence has come from the conservative chattering class. The former Gingrich spokesman Tony Blankley compared Bush's Bob Jones visit with Al Gore's campaign stop among Hasidic Jews. The National Review editorialized that the visit did ''not concern anything important, except for symbolism.'' William F. Buckley Jr. opined that far from criticizing Bush, ''the proper call would have been to instruct, belittle, counsel and if necessary attack those who are willing to translate Bush's appearance at Bob Jones into a mark of indifference to civil rights.'' Even the Catholic League, which initiates mass campaigns if a movie meanders past blasphemy, has essentially given George W. Bush a pass.

What gives? What gives is that on the issue of intolerance, double standards still rule. Black bigotry is anathema. White bigotry is merely regrettable. Associating with anti-Semites is political death. Pandering to Protestant bigots is just one missed opportunity. Maybe Bush has calculated that most American Catholics are so unused to vicious prejudice directed against them that they will forgive and forget. Forgive maybe. But forget? Not this Catholic. And not for a while.